Pakistani Freedom Forum meeting on Lebanon

Brooklyn is home to thousands of working-class Pakistani immigrants. The Pakistani Freedom Forum has been in support of this community that has been a major target of Department of Homeland Security raids since 9/11.

The PFF was formed in an effort to create unity and resistance among the people who have faced hundreds of disappearances and deportations. The PFF has sought to link their organization to the progressive movement in the U.S.

PFF has a dual role: to defend its members in the United States and to expose the ties of the Musharef regime in Pakistan to the U.S. government.

When the May 1 Coalition organized massive protests in support of the rights of immigrants last spring in New York, Comrade Shahid, a leading organizer from the PFF, joined the coalition and became one of its most active members. He helped to organize hundreds of Pakistanis from Brooklyn and New Jersey on May Day in support of all immigrant workers, especially those who are undocumented.

This past September, at the U.N. Church Center, the IAC, Al Awda, and a number of other groups including PFF held a large meeting to denounce the Israeli-United States attack on Lebanon in August.

The PFF organized a dinner/meeting called “Lessons of Lebanon” Oct. 18. The main speakers were Samia Halaby, a Palestinian leader of Al-Awda Right to Return Coalition and Sara Flounders, co-director of the International Action Center, who recently returned from a fact-finding mission in Lebanon.

The Lessons of Lebanon meeting focused on resistance. Samia Halaby said that Hezbollah’s efforts in repelling and neutralizing the Israeli attack were an example of why an occupied people will always resist. She said resistance is “human and essential.” She called the actions of Hezbollah “revolutionary.” She noted how they were a unifying force, respectful of peoples’ differences, stating, “They are part of the soul of the Lebanese people, connecting to the human drive to be free.”

Sara Flounders described Hezbollah’s rebuilding of homes, hospitals, and schools and how she met the people who were in the process of cleaning up the devastation wreaked by Israeli planes and army supplied by the Pentagon. She called Hezbollah a “social organization,” and described its efforts to organize both resistance and reconstruction as “an example of unity for us here.”

Another speaker, Lynne Stewart, arrived a bit late, to the surprise and joy of the organizers. As everyone stood and cheered, with her spouse, Ralph Poynter, at her side, she announced, “You said if I were free on Wednesday night I should drop by, and I am free tonight!” Just two days before the meeting, Stewart was sentenced to 28 months in prison instead of the 30 years the U.S. government was hoping she would receive under the repressive Patriot Act. She will remain free during the appeals process.

She spoke of her life as a criminal lawyer, a life devoted to people who had no one else to defend them. She described the reasons why she tried to help Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, to keep his spirit alive, as she was his only human contact.

The meeting ended with a powerful poem in the Indigenous language, Urdu, by Mohammed Shafique, president of the PFF, describing the anguish of a Lebanese mother whose one-and-a-half-year-old son was killed during the recent Israeli assault.